It's my experience that if you acquire the skills and talk to enough people about them, the opportunities will present themselves. It's not just big companies

It's my experience that if you acquire the skills and talk to enough people about them, the opportunities will present themselves. It's not just big companies out there, there's a lot of smaller ones who can't compete with google in hiring PhDs. These are a good place to build credentials that you can carry you to the larger institutions, if that's where you want to be.